Nine Arches Press

This is the blog of the independent poetry and short story publisher, Nine Arches Press and their flagship magazine, Under the Radar. Drop by to stay in touch with our events, publications and latest news, plus posts of poems and interviews with our poets and authors.

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Sarah James is an award-winning poet, short fiction writer, editor, reviewer and journalist. Her latest book, plenty-fish (Nine Arches Press), is her fourth poetry collection. A multi-media narrative in poems,The Magnetic Diaries, based on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in a modern English setting was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press earlier in 2015. Her debut collection, Into the Yell (Circaidy Gregory Press), won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards and other recent competition wins include the Overton Poetry Prize 2015, Wordpool Festival Poetry Competition 2014 (with her poem animated for the Blackpool Illuminations) and the Poetry on Loan ‘homemade, home-grown’ Poetry Competition 2014. She also enjoys collaboration with other poets, artists and photographers, and is editor at V. Press. Her website is at: www.sarah-james.co.uk .

Cactus Ballgown

This dress should be kept for those prickly occasions

when you sense dryness, and wish to make a point.

Take care. Such sun-sanded satin is not easily

removed once you grow into its green sheen.

Do not plan on letting anyone close.

They will only get hurt. These flowers are not

for picking. Instead, strengthen your spine,

prepare for the pain of being justly deserted.

Above all, beware of the needles when you un-

dress alone, your skin riddled now with pins.

For Her, A Different Skin

Given the right blade, he might slit her.
Not for fox pelt sleekness, or rabbit warmth.

Hang legs from a rafter, limbs parted.
Not for the lush flush of raw pain.

Unseam a red circle; cut deeper.
Not for a bitter scream’s squeezed juice.

Slice the underside, finger it from bone.
For the guts’ intricacy untangled.

Glide hand between, peel from carcass.
In hope of finding skin which fits,

without snicking any arteries.

Wanting

It’s his hands, always his hands.

How fingertips skip from the keyboard

to play arpeggios along my arm.

How the pressure of his palm

steadies the small of my back,

so warmth lingers.

How his index finger, which pushes down

on the knife chopping coriander for curry,

traces my thoughts, soothes creases

from letters, gives shape to my lips.

How that chunky ‘c’ of muscle and bone

curls around his pint glass lifting

from full to empty, full to empty,

while his other hand finger-taps

my beer mat till we synchronise rhythms.

How he pulls weeds from the mud,

hands clasped in a firm grasp

around stubborn necks,

or pushes a kiwi-fruit

from its hessian skin –

forceful, but persuasive.

How he snake-coil-palms

a plum stone sticky with juice,

once he’s sucked the flesh clean;

that pincer-flick movement of air

propelling grapes to his tongue;

his thumb-finger grip on a sachet,

that quick pinch open...

how sometimes he uses his mouth.

Losing Faith

Take home a whole shoal from the fair.

Name them Matthew, Mark, maybe John.

Watch how their varnished orange peel

teases through the bubble’s knotted plastic.

Give them a bigger tank to swim in:

a glassed reality of gravel and weeds.

The hide and seek begins. That curving

around stones. The flitting outline of soft bones.

That deceptive width of tails almost thinned

to water’s transparency. Thick smears

on surfaces tinged green by sunlight’s

revelations. Soon their names flake.

After death, you flush away each, past

twitching. Your son demands a prayer.

About plenty-fish

Sarah James’ precise and astonishing poetry invites us to
taste and touch the flavours, shapes, memory and experiences for ourselves, the
tang of sea-salt tempering the irresistible physicality of these adventurous
poems.

Here, the natural and emotional worlds merge in kaleidoscopic
colours and all around us, nature runs riot. Humans are organisms in an ever-growing,
changing and vanishing habitat; the family an ecosystem complicated by love,
loss and letting go. The poems gather and swirl about you, a shoal of
brilliant, electric moments. The water may be deep and clear, but the undertow
is strong and dark, and sharp enough to cut to the bone.

Praise for plenty-fish

"Sarah James’s plenty-fish is an exciting collection
with much to surprise and delight. Sarah James has a keen eye for the startling
image and memorable metaphor, together with an obvious delight in language and a
real sense of how poems feel in the mouth. Each poem is allowed to find its own
form, its own space on the page and every line is given its own weight. Reading
it from start to finish, I am left with a feeling of the whole collection
celebrating ‘the slipperiness of life’ while never forgetting about ‘death’s
strong stench’ (from ‘Past Sacrificial’)." – Angela France

"I found the poems in this
collection fresh, startling, and at times pleasingly unsettling and disturbing.
They aren't poems to comfort but to question and probe. In other words, they're
poems doing the proper job of waking you up, making you feel more alert to the
world, to its brightness, its cruelty, its beauty. Sarah James has a sure and
assured voice, the true poet's eye for detail which she evokes with an unswerving clarity through well-crafted and precise imagery." – David Calcutt

"Sarah James’s poems
bring the natural world to the page in all its sticky, colourful,
goose-pimpled and prickly reality, tingling with precisely observed images.
With a photographer’s eye, and all her senses finely attuned, she writes with
great honesty of the intimate joys and sadnesses of family life, the body’s
frailties, and of the losses and gains that come with love and vulnerability.
She identifies sacred moments in the everyday and ephemeral; at the flushing
away of fairground goldfish, ‘My son demands a prayer.’ These poems are both
grounded in a luscious physicality, and boldly metaphysical, touching on the
numinous." – Catherine Smith

What does this mean, I hear you ask? Well, we're the first publishers ever to take up this role at Wenlock, and it's possibly the first 'official' publisher residency of its kind at a UK Poetry Festival as far as I can tell. The idea in essence is that I will be transplanting the Nine Arches 'office' from its usual home in Warwickshire and taking it with me to the Edge Arts Centre in Wenlock especially for the festival, from Saturday morning through to Sunday afternoon.

If you come along, you'll find me at my desk, not only surrounded by my in-tray, copious cups of coffee, a well-filled biscuit tin and a fair few manuscripts, but also by several poets. The idea is to give festival goers a real insight into a day-in-the-life of a independent publisher like myself, and a unique chance to find out what goes on behind the scenes to make new poetry books happen.

Throughout the weekend, Nine Arches Press poets will be dropping in to, and we'll be live-editing poetry collections, talking about their books and how they came to be, and even sharing a few readings. I'm delighted that I'll be joined by David Hart, Myra Connell, Josh Ekroy and Bobby Parker - I hope you'll come by and take a moment to join us and see what we're up to and eavesdrop on some of our conversations!

Full listings of the Nine Arches Publisher Residency, and timings:

Saturday 25th April

11.00am/ 11.20 / 11.40 Poetry Surgery slots
The slots are ticketed and need to be booked via the Box Office.

Sunday 26th April

11.00am – 12.00 noon Reveal: the Art of Editing Poetry
Simon Thirsk of Bloodaxe Books invites Nine Arches’ editor Jane Commane with poets Jo Bell and Robert Peake to talk about what goes on behind the scenes of a poetry book. In the digital age, why does good editing still matter, and what’s the value of the poet-editor relationship? Discover how the poets have found the process of editing and putting their poems together – which poems went it and which were cut? Where here any heart-wrenching choices or roads-less- travelled to take? Explore editing as an art, with a frank discussion of the highs and lows, and maybe the occasional typo...
Booking advised! more info: Sun 26th April - Reveal: The Art of Editing Poetry

I'm also inviting you, festival-goer or not, to join in with the interactive nature of the residency. So, is there a question about poetry publishing you've always wanted to ask an editor? If so, this is your big chance... Tweet your questions to me and use the hashtag #AskNineArches and I will collate these queries and tweet and showcase the Q&As throughout my residency. It can be a question about getting published, submitting poetry, or how we choose what to publish - anything you've always wanted to know but never had the chance to ask...

I will also be offering some poetry surgery slots throughout the festival. These are limited and must be booked in advance, but are a great opportunity to bring a long a poem that you'd like feedback on or to ask for some advice on publishing. These slots can be booked here - and you can also read here about how the Emergency poet soothes our pre-festival panic and nerves with a perfect poetry prescription!

So, here's to springtime sunshine on the hills of Shropshire this weekend, hope to see you there!

Thursday, 2 April 2015

In our latest blog post, Jo Bell tells us a bit more about what's behind the title of her second collection of poems.

Someone asked me once what my favourite word was. Perhaps we
should all be grateful that I passed over my usual favourite, schadenfreude, and settled instead on kith.

It came unbidden, and it hasn’t left my mind since. I liked
the sound of it. It felt old, and northern-English, and simple in the way that
a penknife or a wooden spoon is simple. The word became a prism through which
to see the world – or rather, it was the prism through which I had always seen
the world, before I knew what to call it.

Who knows you; who are your fellow travellers? Your partner,
your ex-partner, your oldest friends – these people know an unvarnished,
warts-and-all version. But our impact on one another’s lives is not in
proportion to the time we spend together. Holiday friends, one-night stands, hated
colleagues, a stranger who shared a moment of drama; these can know you deeply.
Likewise those who share your race, your politics, your passion for stamp
collecting or transvestism. I once spent an hour speaking with a counsellor who
seemed to understand me completely, and left the room with a different life
ahead of me. Yet a sexual partner, who knows you so well in some ways, may
understand you very little in others.

Once the title fell into place, I realised that most of my
poems are an exploration of it. In Raising
the roof for Kirsty, oldfriends
enjoy a moment of silliness and companionship. In Worship, ill-matched lovers seize a moment of trespass and sexual
connection. In Silbury Hill or A Nightingale for Gilbert Smith there
is a fellowship with the dead, who inhabited the same landscape as us and knew things
which we have to relearn (my dead, of course, are Northern and stroppy with it,
as are many of my living). In Society of
Friends, a woman I never even spoke to passes on an illuminating thought.
In Lifted and other poems of the
canal, I try to explain the relationship of boat dwellers to their watery
environment – where, as we say, the only rule of the river is that the river
rules. I write often about sexual partners; how we please and disappoint, how
we try to know each other. Even if we fail, there’s honour and generosity in
the attempt.

All the poems of Kith
are an acknowledgement that wherever you’re going, you aren’t travelling there
alone. Our relationships with one another are not always easy or clear but they
are inevitable, ragged, glorious in their variety; an essential condition of
travelling at all.

Tuesday, 17 March 2015

Robert Peake is a British-American poet living near London. His previous publication was a pamphlet, The Silence Teacher(Poetry Salzburg, 2013) and his previous short collection Human Shade was included in New Poets | Short Books, Vol. V (Lost Horse Press, 2011). His first full-length collection The Knowledge is forthcoming April 2015 from Nine Arches Press and can pre-ordered here.

"The Knowledge is quirky, wide-ranging, luminous and completely enthralling. If there were an A – Z of all the places poetry should take us, this would be it." - John Glenday

Robert Peake’s incredible eye for detail illuminates a collection of stirring and delicately attuned poems that not only roam but actively seek – travelling to all manner of places but also moving through time, taking leaps of faith or journeys into memory and sensation. These poems refer to a kind of knowledge that isn’t just sought or gained, but is felt and experienced, known in your heart and in your bones as much as in your mind.

From postcards to portraits, from ancient and modern wars to cosmopolitan cities, wildlife, and even a tiny ornamental skeleton, Robert Peake finds a sharp focus for the bigger picture both far and wide and closer to home. These carefully-controlled and eloquent poems know the subtle and deep consequences from each small gesture; the ripple-effect across each story, the altering of lives and history; the still, quiet centre from which it all begins.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

What a year it's been! There have been plenty of highlights in 2014, so here are just a few of them from my publishing and poetry year at Nine Arches Press. It has been a really packed year – probably my busiest yet – but it has also felt like a very gratifying year for all the throwing myself into the heart of stuff and feeling much cheered by all the excellent poetry I’ve read and enjoyed and have been so fortunate to have partaken in, edited, published and shared in 2014.

January kicked off with some great live poetry - our first Leicester Shindig of the year, featuring Cathy Grindrod, Lindsay Waller-Wilkinson, Charlie Jordan & Joe Coghlan, all helping us to get the year off to the right start with lively and enjoyable readings. There was also a memorable and rather special evening of poetry at Poetry bites, as Angela France & Daniel Sluman performed to a packed Kitchen Garden Café in Birmingham. After a lot of work over the festive period, I also launched the brand new Nine Arches website and online shop, which has proved to be much more user friendly and popular!

February was a little quieter on the event front, but a hive of activity behind the scenes as the final touches were put to this year’s collections.

In March, independent publishing was properly celebrated at the annual States of Independence book-fair at Leicester De Montfort – we sold lots of books, as usual, but more importantly had plenty of interesting conversations and a great chance to put faces to names for all those we’ve met online but not in real life. And another great day out was also had later the same month at the inaugural Writing East Midlands Writer’s Conference at Nottingham University, where I provided a series of one-to-ones for poets to book and ask all those questions about publishing you’ve always wanted to ask but were too afraid to… I hope they proved useful. I’ve been really pleased to see several of those writers now in print in recent months too, which is always heartening.

April came around, and I found myself at the wonderful Wenlock Poetry Festival. Nestled in the Shropshire hills, for one weekend each year this small town is taken over by poets and poetry audiences and all manner of performances, talks and workshops. It was a great chance to catch up with lots of people, but also to make some new friends and acquaintances and enjoy plenty of poetry performances too. Rebecca Goss’ and Helen Tookey’s reading was particular moving and memorable, as was David Morley and Gregory Leadbetter’s outdoor reading at the abbey ruins, where we just about dodged the both the impending rain and the dusk. We concluded our weekend with a Maps & Legends reading, with Jo Bell compering some wonderful readings from Matt Merritt, Mario Petrucci and Maria Taylor that celebrated our first five years in poetry publishing.

May saw the first ‘Towards Poetry Publication’ six-week short course for Writing West Midlands (so popular it was fully booked, and we're now running a second course from 27th Jan 2015). It was also the launch of our Forward Prize-commended debut poetry collection Ways to Build a Roadblock by Josh Ekroy. We headed down to London to launch Josh’s book in a packed cellar bar at the Betsey Trotwood and had a warm reception far and wide for this much-anticipated debut –including requests for signed copies for bookstores! With poetry that is both satirical and instinctively humane, Ekroy has been building a reputation through magazine publication and readings for a number of years. It’s so rewarding when readers take to heart a poet whose work you have also admired and followed – and to see your faith in their work and its distinctive qualities repaid when the books are released out there to find good homes on bookshelves up and down the country. May closed on an especial high point - I spent 31st May at the Sabotage Awards in Oxford, where Nine Arches came away as a prize-winner - Most Innovative Publisher 2014! It's an award that really means a lot to me, as it was voted for by the general public and our readers, and to get that vote of shared love for our books feels important and rather special.

June brought us the launch of Richie McCaffery’s Cairnand Markie Burnhope’s Species – two very distinct and exciting debut collections that I was enormously proud to have as part of 2014’s list. From Richie’s brilliantly-detailed and revelatory miniatures to Markie’s sharp and astonishing technicolour focus on otherness and injustice (amongst so much more), there was a great deal to be celebrated here in these two first collections.

In July we had a grand time at Ledbury Poetry Festival It was also (at last) a delightful opportunity to meet poets Bobby Parker, Richie McCaffery and Dorothy Lehane for the first time in real life, after many months of email correspondence and working on their collections, and a proper treat to hear Dorothy, Richie, and Bobby read from their debut collections at the festival. It is often in those first ‘voicings’ that a collection truly comes alive for me. This month also saw the launch of the brilliant second collection from Tony Williams, The Midlands. It’s always a pleasure to work with a returning poet, and a real treat to have the opportunity work with Tony again on a book that touched on so many of my personal favourite themes – ideas of places lost and found, walking and journeying, and of course the Midlands themselves which, characteristically, lurked resplendent, both bashful and beautiful, within the collection’s own marvellous scenery.

August saw a short break in book launches but still plenty of behind the scenes work going on, and plenty of planning as a busy Autumn lay ahead on return form my holdiays!

September was a particular highlight of the autumn, with a lovely day in London at the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair, where we joined with our good friends at Worple Press (Peter Carpenter and Michael McKimm) to give a joint reading outdoors with Matt Merritt and Josh Ekroy representing Nine Arches in the park café, whilst indoors, books sold rapidly and we had a chance to catch up with many of our other fellow publishers and poets. It seemed to be particularly busy this year, and there was a real buzz around the whole fair. Huge thanks to Joey Connolly and Chrissy Williams for yet again putting on a great day, and for the beautiful book fair booklet – which featured a poem by Richie McCaffery amongst many others from each press.

October brought another annual highlight in the form of the Birmingham Literature Festival. A personal favourite among my events this year was out ‘Poetry Afloat’ event at the festival with Jo Bell and Tony Williams joining a (quite literally) captive audience aboard the canal boat Frederick as we toured Birmingham’s inland waterways and saw the city from an entirely new viewpoint, accompanied by Jo and Tony’s poems along the way. Even the Brummagem drizzle couldn’t dampen our enjoyment of this little poetry voyage! This was also a month of frenetic publishing activity – with the launch of three books. First up wasA Midlands Odyssey (ten stories re-imagining the Homeric epic as heard recently heard on BBC Radio 4), which is now also available as an eBook. Hot on the heels of this came Dorothy Lehane’s debut poems, Ephemeris and Bobby Parker’sBlue Movie. Whilst taking unique approaches, both Lehane and Parker share the theme of personal territories within their poems. Solidly and deftly written, both also are attuned to the particular music that their poetry requires, an understanding which makes them urgent and unmissable debuts with a great deal to say.

November saw us entering the winter with a flurry of activity. Leicester Shindig! featured wonderful live poetry from Michael W. Thomas, Andrew Taylor, DA Prince and Ben Wilkinson and, as always, an excellent selection of open-mic readers bringing a breadth of subjects and styles to proceedings. I also took part in The Writer’s Toolkit for Writing West Midlands, and enjoyed several informative panel talks and a good end-of-year catch up with lots of regional friends and colleagues – even if it seemed a little incredible that 2014 was already speeding past us and out of our grasp...

December opened with a thoroughly enjoyable day at the Library of Birmingham for the first ever Library Toolkit (convened by the West Midlands Reader’s Network and Writing West Midlands) were I gave a talk on how to work with independent publishers and spread the good why about why indie publishers matter (and what we can offer to libraries that the bigger publishers just can’t). And one last reading – a great evening in the best bookshop in the region, Nottingham’s very own Five Leaves Bookshop. With probably the best poetry section since I’ve seen since (the now sadly-demised) Borders, this bookshop is a real gem and I urge all book lovers to pay it a visit. As well as thoughtfully-chosen poetry and fiction, it has a brilliant selection of political, social and historical and lots of independently-published books that show real, dedicated book-lovers are responsible for this warm, cosy and welcoming bookshop. Bobby Parker, Tony Williams, Dorothy Lehane and Matt Merritt all joined us for an excellent showcase of Nine Arches talent, which (along with the mince pies and wine) was much enjoyed by an appreciative audience. December has also seen the end of a few projects, including one I have worked on with HEARTH over this last year, and also the beginning of several new projects (some of which I can’t talk about yet, you’ll just have to wait and see!).

All of which brings me to the end of this round up, and to wish you, our poets, readers and supporters, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Here’s to much more great new poetry in 2015, and a happy, healthy and creative year ahead to you all.

This weekend, we'll be in Nottingham at the wonderful independent Five Leaves Bookshop, to round off a great year of new poetry with four of our poets - come and join us!

In the final event in the Five Leaves Bookshop poetry series, join us to enjoy a fine selection of poets from Nine Arches Press:

Dorothy Lehane is an Assistant Lecturer in Creative Writing and PhD candidate in Poetry: Text Practice as Research at the University of Kent. Her chapbook Places of Articulation is forthcoming in November 2014 with dancing girl press, Chicago. She is the founding editor of Litmus Publishing, an Arts Council England funded press exploring the intersection of poetry and science. Her work has recently appeared in Glasgow Review of Books, HARTS & Minds, Tears in the Fence, and Zone Magazine. She has performed her work at various venues in the UK including The Barbican, The Science Museum, The Roundhouse, BBC Radio Kent, Sounds New Music Festival, In The Woods Festival and Canterbury Art Festival. Her Nine Arches Press poetry collection,Ephemeris, is published this October.

Bobby Parker was born in 1982 and lives in Kidderminster, England. Publications include the critically acclaimed experimental books Ghost Town Music and Comberton, both published by The Knives Forks & Spoons Press. His poetry, artwork and photography have appeared in various reputable magazines in print and on-line and he writes a poetry column for The Quietus. His reading style has been described as “Gripping, weird, relatable but alienating, emotional, totally fantastic poetry.”- Café Writers. Blue Movie(Nine Arches Press) is his first full collection of poems.

Tony Williams grew up in Matlock in Derbyshire and now lives in Northumberland. His first collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh, Portico and Michael Murphy Prizes, and All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. He also writes prose fiction.The Midlands(Nine Arches Press, July 2014) is his second collection of poetry.

Matt Merritt is a poet and wildlife journalist from Leicester. His third collection, The Elephant Tests, is out now from Nine Arches, and previous publications include hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (Nine Arches, 2010), Troy Town (Arrowhead, 2008), and Making The Most Of The Light (HappenStance, 2005). He blogs at: polyolbion.blogspot.co.uk

Thursday, 23 October 2014

Bobby Parker was born in 1982 and lives in Kidderminster, England. Publications include the critically acclaimed experimental books Ghost Town Music and Comberton, both published by The Knives Forks & Spoons Press. His poetry, artwork and photography have appeared in various reputable magazines in print and on-line and he writes a poetry column for The Quietus. His reading style has been described as “Gripping, weird, relatable but alienating, emotional, totally fantastic poetry.”- Café Writers. Blue Movie is his first full collection of poems.

Bobby Parker’s poems play truth or dare, baring the soul of the small town blues: undaunted by subject matter and fearless of propriety or prettiness, he writes with dynamic clarity of frightening, lonely places within and without our selves.

In this debut full collection, Parker holds back on nothing – both daringly up-front and utterly candid, Blue Movie veers between disaster, horror, comedy, sex, drugs, love and parenthood with dare-you-to-laugh brilliance. Along with their starkness and mucky-faced honesty, these poems are meticulously crafted, canny, and always one step ahead.